Chapter Ten
CHARLIE
The Next Day
I will not eat Rogue. I will not eat Rogue. I will not eat Rogue.
The mantra loops through my head on day four the same way it has every morning since we arrived at this cabin, threadbare from repetition, held together by sheer determination and not much else.
I repeat it while I watch the shadows shift on the ceiling above my bed.
I repeat it when I hear his boots cross the hallway, and the cadence of his heartbeat precedes him the way a storm front does pressure.
The most maddeningly edible sound in the known universe.
He hasn’t tried to kill me today, which I’m counting as progress.
I also haven’t tried to eat him, which I’m counting as a miracle.
The bloodlust is… marginally better. Marginally.
Like trading an open wound for one with a bandage that’s mostly holding.
There are stretches now, twenty minutes, sometimes forty, where the hunger recedes to a low, constant roar instead of a full-throated scream.
Where I can sit in the same room as Rogue without my vision tunneling down to the pulse point at the side of his throat.
Where I remember that I was a person once, a whole person, who liked terrible reality television and overcaffeinated lattes and casual sex with boys whose names I never learned.
Then something will shift, a movement too fast, a scent carried on a draft, and the forty minutes of relative peace collapse into five seconds of white-knuckled control and everything starting over from the beginning.
“You’re restless,” Rogue says from the doorway.
No knock—he never knocks anymore. I think he decided early on that the warning of his approach is more likely to wind me up than settle me down, so he substitutes presence for announcement, appearing in doorframes like he grew there.
Tonight he’s leaning a shoulder against the frame, arms folded, watching me stare at the ceiling with the expression he reserves for things he’s still calculating.
“I’m always restless.”
“Tonight is different.” His nostrils flare, almost imperceptible. “You’re not afraid. You’re…” he hesitates for a moment, “… coiled.”
He’s not mistaken. Something is running beneath my skin tonight that isn’t quite hunger and isn’t quite anxiety, something older and more animal, stirred up by the darkness pressing against the curtained windows, by the smell of pine and cold earth that seeps through every gap in the cabin walls.
Something that has teeth and would very much like to use them.
“Get your boots on,” he says.
“We’re going outside?” My entire body comes to sudden, sharp attention with a speed that startles even me.
“You need to hunt.”
The words land differently than I expect.
Not with the horror that attached itself to the same concept a week ago, when hunting meant humans, meant loss of control, meant the diner, meant the woman, meant the red-edged shame that I can’t wash off no matter how many times my mind circles back to scrub at it.
This time, the word lands somewhere lower.
Somewhere that responds before my brain catches up.
“Animals,” he clarifies, reading whatever crosses my face. “Deer are in these woods. You need to learn what your body is capable of when it’s meant to do this. Not the panic, not the accident. The real thing.”
I get my boots on before he finishes the sentence, and then we’re both headed outside the cabin.
The night hits me like a living thing, and every sense I have detonates.
The smell of the forest is overwhelming in the best possible way—damp soil, pine resin, cold air, and the distant, warm, vital scent of something alive and moving far out in the dark.
The sound of it follows a second later, the soft sound of hooves on frozen ground, the rustle of breath from small lungs, the whole secret night-language of a forest that doesn’t know anything is watching.
But I am watching.
“Stay with me,” Rogue says, his voice dropped to nothing louder than a breath.
He moves through the tree line with a silence that shouldn’t be possible for a man of his size, that hunter’s grace that his lycan nature gives him, every step placed with unnatural precision.
I fall beside him without needing to think about it.
My body already knows how to do this part.
It has been screaming for it since I woke up with fangs.
“We follow the scent trail, downwind. Let the instinct surface, but don’t surrender to it. Feel the difference.”
“The difference between what?”
“Between you directing the hunger, and the hunger directing you.” He glances sideways, gold eyes flashing briefly in the dark. “You’ve been fighting it like it’s the enemy. Tonight it’s a tool. Understand?”
I don’t quite, but my feet keep moving.
We track the deer for twenty minutes through the dark, and somewhere in those twenty minutes, something begins to loosen inside me.
The hunger doesn’t disappear, it never does, but it shifts register, transforming from the frantic, desperate clawing of something starved and drowning into something cleaner and more focused.
My senses arrange themselves into a hierarchy I didn’t know they had, the deer’s heartbeat rising above everything else in the frequency of my attention, a warm, drumming beacon I am pulling toward with every silent step.
Rogue moves beside me, a heat-signature in the dark, and I am acutely, electrically aware of him in a way that has nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with something far more inconvenient.
The deer breaks, a flash of pale movement between the trees, and every thought in my head disappears.
My body moves before my mind gives permission.
Pure speed, pure velocity… the ground blurs beneath me, wind screaming past my ears, and I am flying, not metaphorically, genuinely flying through the dark in a way I have never in four days of this nightmare been allowed to feel, and it is extraordinary, it is magnificent, the first thing about this body I have ever wanted to keep.
The cold air tears at my hair, and my lungs fill with pine, frost, and the hot, vital scent of the animal ahead, and my whole newly dead body screams ‘Yes, finally, yes,’ in a register that has no language attached.
Rogue runs beside me.
For three strides, he’s still human.
Then something in him breaks loose.
It starts with sound, a low, wet shift beneath skin, bone adjusting with a series of sharp, internal cracks that carry even over the rush of wind in my ears. His breath changes mid-stride, dragging deeper, rougher, like his lungs are rewriting themselves around something larger.
His jaw shifts first, the line of it cracking wider, teeth lengthening into something made for tearing rather than speaking.
His eyes flare, gold burning through the dark with a brightness that feels alive, aware, locked onto something far ahead of us.
Fur breaks through skin in a ripple that moves like a wave across his body, dark and dense and wrong only in the way all transformations are wrong the first time you witness them.
It should slow him.
It doesn’t.
By the time the change finishes, he’s no longer keeping pace.
He is setting it.
Massive, fast, and controlled in a way that makes the violence of it worse somehow, because none of this is accidental. Every movement lands with precision, claws biting into the forest floor, muscles coiling and releasing with brutal efficiency as he runs.
A wolf.
No.
Not just a wolf.
Something older, larger, built from the same rules but pushed further than nature ever intended.
My body reacts before my thoughts can catch up, and something slams into me like a tidal wave, like my instincts know exactly what this is and my brain is still scrambling to catch the fuck up. I have a deep connection to him that I cannot control.
It isn’t hunger. I know what hunger feels like by now, because I’ve been living inside it for days. This is different. This feels like instinct grabbing me by the throat before my brain can catch up. Like something missing just slammed into place so hard I feel the impact in my bones.
I glance at him.
He’s already looking at me.
Gold eyes, mid-run, locked on mine for one fraction of a second with an expression I can’t read at this speed, and then we’re both looking forward again, and the deer is close and the moment is gone.
But the echo of it doesn’t go anywhere.
Heat flares low in my chest, sharper now.
But we run.
No words.
No need.
Two predators cutting through the dark, moving toward the same point with a shared certainty that settles deep in my bones, and the alignment of it, the sheer, undeniable rightness of running beside him like this, sends a warmth through me that has nothing to do with the cold night air.
The deer is close. I can feel its heartbeat stuttering with fear, can smell the hot musk of its panic, can hear the desperate scramble of hooves on frozen earth as it cuts hard between two ancient pines, and I cut with it, perfectly matched, reaching, reaching—
And then Rogue comes from the left at the exact same moment I come from the right.
We crash into each other at full supernatural speed, his shoulder slamming into mine, and the impact throws us both sideways.
I hit a tree trunk with enough force to crack the bark, and the deer, the beautiful terrified deer and its perfect drumming heartbeat, tears away into the darkness and is gone.
The silence that follows is enormous.
I straighten, slowly. Fury is building in my chest with every second it takes me to register what just happened.
The hunger that had been channeled, focused, aimed like an arrow at a target, now has nowhere to go.
It turns and finds the nearest available body, which is Rogue, standing three feet away in the dark, breathing hard, now in human form, looking not at all apologetic about the collision that cost us everything.